Linux: Getting date & time of system startup

Question

I know that uptime prints the time a machine has been up and running, but is there an easier (reliable) way to get the date of the start up than counting down from this output?

I tried looking around /proc, but didn't find anything of relevance. There's also a line like this on my dmesg: [ 0.673492] rtc_cmos rtc_cmos: setting system clock to 2011-03-14 14:26:52 UTC (1300112812), but I'm wondering if this method is distribution and kernel version agnostic.

Answer 1

I found some commands here. Try who -b or last reboot | head -1.
who gives numeric dates, while last reboot returns abbreviated day / month names.

Answer 2

The simplest way is to look to see when /sbin/init started (that's always the first process to be started after the kernel loads):

# ls -ld /proc/1
dr-xr-xr-x 7 root root 0 2011-03-27 23:54 /proc/1

So I can see that my machine booted up at 6 minutes to midnight on the 27th of March 2011.

If you want to use it in scripting you can use the stat command instead:

# stat --printf='%Y' /proc/1
1301266491

The %Y specifies the time since the directory was last changed (process creation time) in seconds since the epoch (1/1/70) and is a standard unix timestamp.

Answer 3

This queries the uptime from the kernel and displays it in the local timezone:

date -d "`cut -f1 -d. /proc/uptime` seconds ago"

Be careful about other options. The last command will stop working as soon as wtmp has been rotated. The who command depends on the availability and integrity of utmp. And /proc/1 might have the current date instead of the boot time date, and could even be unavailable on a hardened system. Edit: dmesg only has a fixed-length back buffer, so it is unrealiable, too. The kernel logs may be in /var/log but most distributions only keep 8 weeks of them.

Answer 4

In Linux,

ls -ld /proc

seems to give me what I need. The post above is odd. /proc/uptime does not contain a date value – it would have to be subtracted from the current time. Maybe he meant:

date -d @$(( $(date +%s) - $(cut -f1 -d. /proc/uptime) ))

Answer 5

I found the btime line in /proc/stat when poking around a bit

cat /proc/stat | grep btime | awk '{ print $2 }'

and after a quick search, i found this page: /proc/stat explained, which outlines the "Various pieces of information about kernel activity are available in the /proc/stat file."

The "btime" line gives the time at which the system booted, in seconds since the Unix epoch.

Answer 6

• good: who -b or parsing /proc/uptime
• bad: ls -ld /proc/1 and variants.

Don't use ls -ld /proc/1 for this purpose. It's sometimes updated after s2disk or s2ram.

In my case, who -b said:

system boot May 2 09:51

While ls -ld /proc/1:

dr-xr-xr-x 7 root root 0 May 3 13:09 /proc/1

ls -ld for /proc or /sys seem to persist after resuming, but it's implementation dependent, and may change in future, so don't use such methods. And if your system clock is in localtime, not UTC, they have negative offset.

(I don't have the privilege to comment to answers yet, so opened a new answer. Sorry.)